How to Modify Facebook Open Graph Properties of Your Landing Pages

Facebook is one of the biggest source of news on the internet. This makes Facebook even more responsible for what is being shared on the platform. Recently, the social media giant has been working on putting up measures against fake news shared on the site.

On 18 July, Facebook removed the ability to edit the text shown in a preview of a link shared onto the platform. This means you can no longer use a customized image, text, or headline when you share a link to your landing page on Facebook.

Here’s what Matthew Robertson from Facebook says in his blog post on Facebook’s developers blog:

“By removing the ability to customize link metadata (i.e. headline, description, image) from all link sharing entry points on Facebook, we are eliminating a channel that has been abused to post false news.”

But Facebook is also working on a solution to support publishers that use this functionality quite often.

“Today we’re also releasing a solution to support publishers who rely on overwriting link preview metadata to customize how their content appears to audiences on Facebook. We’re introducing a tab in Page Publishing Tools for publishers to indicate link ownership and continue editing how their own links appear on Facebook. For more information please visit our Help Center.”

However, this tool will be available only to publishers in the fields of news, sports, and entertainment. Facebook product team justifies this decision by saying that they found out that many of these Page types modify links to their own articles.

How will this affect GetResponse landing pages?

If you have a Facebook page and your business is not operating in the field of media, you won’t have the Link Ownership tab, which could let you edit your links.

In such a case, you need to be sure that the landing page you share on Facebook has all the required Open Graph properties. The Open Graph properties are generated automatically once you fill in the details of your landing page inside the landing page settings.

Here’s how to do it step-by-step:

1. Make sure you fill in the page title and description fields, and upload a Facebook share image.

You can find all of these inside the landing page creator. Simply click on the gear icon. The proper size for a Facebook share image is 1200 x 630.

2. Publish your page and go to your Facebook page to share the URL.

3. Publish your post.

If you would like to make any changes on the image, description or the title, just go back to the settings inside the landing page creator.

If you’d like to learn more about this change, have a look at what Facebook has to say here, here and here.

Also, Facebook created a link debugger that allows you to see a preview of how your links would look like. This may also come handy.

Back to you

Were you modifying your links often before sharing them on Facebook? Do you think this would affect small businesses and the way they reach their audience?

Let us know in the comments.

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